Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The religion which is to guide and fulfill the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science.

In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.

Character is an invincible force, which acts by presence and without means

Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries.

Fear is a great instructor.

It is hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert fires people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone.

'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.

There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.

It is only when mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen. If the intellect were always awake, and every noble sentiment, the man might go in huckaback or mats, and his dress would be admired and imitated.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!-it seems to say,-there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.

I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and in large relations; whilst they must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

I think that the heroism which at this day would make on us the impression of Epaminondas and Phocion must be that of a domestic conqueror. He who shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of Convention and Fashion, and show men how to lead a clean, handsome and heroic life amid the beggarly elements of our cities and villages; whoso shall teach me how to eat my meat and take my repose and deal with men, without any shame following, will restore the life of man to splendor, and make his own name dear to all history.

If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

Every wall is a door.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

All ages of belief have been great; all of unbelief have been mean.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds,--epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it.

It is a greater joy to see the author's author, than himself.

The key to every man is his thought.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

All science is transcendental or else passes away.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.

The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive.

Our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards.

A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him,Mnot bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club.

History - a biography of a few stout and earnest persons

The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.